Digital satellite systems, DVD players, digital cameras and high definition televisions, as well as PC graphics, games and the Internet, offer a huge amount of digital video and audio data. In order for the digital infrastructure to process this multimedia data effectively, however, the data should be transmitted and displayed digitally without any loss from analog transmission and display technologies.
One method of transmitting multimedia uses the IEEE standard 1394, which is commonly known as Firewire or i-Link. This method provides for a high transmission speed of presently 400 Mbps and up to 3200 Mbps in the future. It is presently necessary, however, to perform a cyclic redundancy check (CRC) or a similar check in order to detect and correct bit errors occurring during transmission. Moreover, for a transmission speed of about 400 Mbps, the maximum length that data can be transmitted over a twisted pair cable using this method is about 4.5 meters, and the maximum length that data can be transmitted over a multimode optical fiber using this method is about 100 meters. In addition, the Firewire technology uses a high level protocol to communicate between the transmitter side and the receiver side.
Another method of transmitting multimedia data such as audio and video data is a method that uses the MPEG format to achieve data compression in order to minimize the required bandwidth. This method, however, is not lossless, and information contained in the original data before it is compressed is lost and cannot be recovered on the receiver side.
While it is important for certain applications that every detail of the transmitted data be recoverable at the receiver side, it is also important to reduce the bandwidth of the transmitted data in order to save bandwidth of the transmission channel.
A system is sought that can transmit multimedia data with reduced bandwidth, but yet that does not lose data in data compression processes prior to transmission.